


quasar

by toomoon (jjjat3am)



Category: ONEWE (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28057242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/pseuds/toomoon
Summary: The door to the studio cracks open and Yonghoon’s head pokes in with a grin. Hyungu tamps down on his answering smile, knowing it’ll come out too wide."How's my favorite dongsaeng doing?" Yonghoon asks."Giwook's studio is down the hall, why don't you ask him?" Hyungu says flatly.or,Hyungu stays at the studio late into the night. Yonghoon comes looking.
Relationships: Jin Yonghoon/Kang Hyungu | Kanghyun
Comments: 7
Kudos: 87





	quasar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suheafoams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suheafoams/gifts).



> DEAR DAHLIA! Happy birthday to you. I hope you celebrate it well and do all the things you want to do, and that the cake you make is delicious. You've been talking about leader line a lot recently so I hope it's okay that I wrote you some. I hope it inspires you to write it. I wanted to say thank you, for supporting my work always even when it's not in fandoms you know, and for always leaving me long and encouraging comments. They mean a lot, more than I can say. So I hope you like this story too.

There’s a knock and Hyungu blinks, looking up from the track he’s working on. It’s dark in the studio. It doesn’t have any windows and it makes it hard to keep track of time, especially when he gets caught up in his work. His eyes burn and he rubs his palms against them, dark dots swimming across his vision.

There’s another knock. He thought he imagined it. “Come in,” he calls out, trying in vain to straighten out the clutter on his desk and throw some of the stray paper in the trash.

The door cracks open and Yonghoon’s head pokes in with a grin. Hyungu tamps down on his answering smile, knowing it’ll come out too wide, and gives him a small smirk instead.

“Hyungu-ah,” Yonghoon says, a sing-songy quality to his voice, and Hyungu rolls his eyes, but presses his body against the desk so Yonghoon can push the door open and step fully into the small studio space. 

“What are you doing here? I’m not on vlive,” Hyungu says with a sigh. The lights in the hallway were dim, which he’s grateful for because they hadn’t blinded him, but it’s also concerning because it probably means there’s no one else in the building. 

“Can’t I come see how my favorite dongsaeng is doing?” Yonghoon says, grinning. He steps deeper into the room, pushing Hyungu up against the desk. The room is tiny but Yonghoon makes it seem even smaller, at his full height, the top of his head almost brushing the ceiling. Hyungu reaches below the desk, pulls out a stool just so Yonghoon will sit down and stop towering above him.

“You are such a liar,” Hyungu says, as Yonghoon drops onto the stool with an exaggerated groan. “Giwook is your favorite dongsaeng.”

“My second favorite dongsaeng,” Yonghoon amends. He makes himself comfortable on the stool, giving the computer a completely unsubtle glance. Even sitting like this, he’s as tall as Hyungu.

“That’s Dongmyeong,” Hyungu points out calmly. Yonghoon wiggles out of his winter coat, dropping it into a heap on the floor, and the motion makes the edges of the cloth brush against Hyungu’s bare forearms. He’s pulled his sleeves up hours ago because it’s hot in the studio, with the heating and the equipment. 

“Dongmyeong is a demon and I don’t like him anymore,” Yonghoon says with a surprising amount of vehemence. He gestures expansively and Hyungu notices that he’s got a convenience store bag hanging from hand.

“What did Dongmyeong, your formerly second favorite dongsaeng, do to deserve this?” Hyungu says, and tries to scoot backwards subtly, out of the way of Yonghoon’s flailing limbs.

“He and his equally demonic twin brother- ” Yonghoon begins venomously.

Hyungu cuts him off. “Dongju is an angel and I won’t stand for you talking about him like that,” he says, biting down on a smile as Yonghoon rolls his eyes dramatically before he continues.

“Dongmyeong and his twin brother, who is your Oneus bias,” Yonghoon says, obedient, “broke into my snack stash last night and ate it all!”

He huffs, and crosses his arms, and Hyungu reaches up to cover his mouth under the guise of scratching his nose so Yonghoon won’t see the smile that’s breaking out.

“That’s really awful,” he says dryly.

“Isn’t it?” Yonghoon bursts out, the frown on his face deepening.

“Oh, yes,” Hyungu says, “it’s almost as awful as that time all of you decided to use my shampoo without asking and -”

“Anyway, I bought some snacks,” Yonghoon cuts him off hurriedly, bringing the bag up to shake it in front of Hyungu’s face like it’ll distract him. “To celebrate your new position as my second favorite dongsaeng.”

“Wow, lucky me,” Hyungu says flatly, as Yonghoon upends the bag out on the desk, sending its contents worryingly near the keyboard. “Careful! I haven’t saved that yet.”

Yonghoon sends him a scandalized look. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep saving your work? You remember what happened with Giwokkie? It took Harin hours to get that track back.”

The incident in question involved Giwook clicking on a link to watch some kitten videos Hyungu had sent him, and somehow accidentally totally switching off the producing software he’d been using. When he’d booted it up again, the track that he and Yonghoon had been working on for hours had disappeared, causing everyone to promptly freak the fuck out. The rest is peak Yonghoon exaggerating - it took Harin about two clicks to get the file back but that was because Harin was a magical god of fixing things, or so Dongmyeong claimed to anyone in vicinity the moment he got drunk.

Still, Hyungu saves his track, and then saves it again for good measure, and pushes the keyboard out of the way so Yonghoon can lay out some of the snacks he’s brought. The sight of them makes Hyungu’s stomach growl and he tilts his head, trying to subtly read Yonghoon’s watch. The time there makes him wince. He’s worked straight through dinner.

“There,” Yonghoon says, then gestures at the spread he’s put out, “you can pick first, since we’re celebrating. I brought all my favorites.” 

Hyungu takes a good look at the snacks in the dim light of the desklamp and entirely fails to hold in a laugh. The snacks that Yonghoon has brought aren’t his favorites - they’re Hyungu’s.

Yonghoon, who definitely knows that Hyungu missed a meal. Yonghoon, who had an early schedule that morning, whose dark circles aren’t just a trick of shadows from the lamplight, who should already be asleep, not in Hyungu’s dark and stuffy studio in the middle of the night.

“Thanks, hyung,” comes out a little choked up, but Yonghoon does him the courtesy of not remarking on it, just chooses a different food to open. They sit like that, quiet, munching on their respective snacks. 

Hyungu settles into his chair, hoping he’s subtle enough to watch Yonghoon from the corner of his eye without him noticing. And Yonghoon really must be tired because he doesn’t look away from his bag of chips, seemingly intent on the wall of figurines that Hyungu has collected and displayed in the studio in an effort to make it seem less like a big dark box he works in almost every day.

As carefully as he dares, he scoots a little closer to where Yonghoon is sitting. Like this, he realizes he can smell him, clean linen and cologne, and the barest hint of winter smog. It makes him a little self-conscious about his own smell, having been sitting still for hours in front of a computer. 

Yonghoon puts his elbow casually on the armrest of Hyungu’s desk chair. It brings them almost close enough to touch. Yonghoon always runs warm. Carefully, Hyungu bridges the distance between them to press their shoulders together. 

If this were anyone else in the band, Yonghoon would already have an arm around them, or their legs entwined, or, in Giwook’s case, he would have tried to pull him out of the chair and into his lap. But with Hyungu, in private, Yonghoon has always been aware and careful of his boundaries. The most of anyone Hyungu’s ever met, probably. 

“What were you working on?” Yonghoon asks around a mouthful of chips, and offers him an unrepentant smile when Hyungu makes a show of wiping his crumbs off the desk. He looks sleepy and rumpled, hair mussed out of its gelled state, eyeliner stuck to the corners of his eyes, where he must have missed wiping off his make-up.

“Not sure yet,” Hyungu says, and thinks about the song he’s got on his hard drive, his powerful guitar threaded through with spaces for Giwook’s rap, Dongmyeong’s softer tones and Yonghoon’s soaring vocals. “Something good enough for the EP hopefully.”

Yonghoon makes a thoughtful noise. “Have you got the lyrics yet?” he asks.

Hyungu thinks about his lyrics notebook, cramped pages filled with wobbly letters about things he can’t say, all the ways he wishes he could take an eraser to all of his insecurities and doubts, and reach across the distance between their chairs to take Yonghoon’s hand. 

“I think I have something there too,” he says and Yonghoon nods, satisfied. He’s curious but he won’t ask Hyungu to see the song until Hyungu is ready to share it with him. 

“Then, because you’ve worked so hard today,” Yonghoon says, wiping his fingers on his hoodie and opening a bottle of water, “let’s go home after this, okay?”

Hyungu, caught up in the way his throat moves when he takes a drink, his long fingers flexing on the plastic bottle, can only nod.

“Sure, hyung,” he says quietly, because Yonghoon looks at him questioningly. He rubs his palms against his burning eyes, so he won’t be tempted to move them elsewhere. Black spots swim across his vision, superimposed over Yonghoon’s skin like inverted constellations. Among them, Yonghoon’s answering smile is the birth of a galaxy. 

There’s probably a song in that.

Yonghoon glances at his watch and frowns. “We should hurry back so we can catch Dongmyeong awake,” he says, grabbing for his coat.

Hyungu raises an eyebrow. “Why would we need to do that?” His own coat is somewhere in the mess of stuff behind him. He’s not looking forward to digging through it. 

Yonghoon levels him with a flat look. “So we can rub Dongmyeong’s face into the fact that he’s not my favorite dongsaeng anymore,” he says, in a tone that suggests he thinks Hyungu should know this. “He’ll see you and get jealous, and then he’ll apologize and admit once and for all that I’m his favorite hyung.”

“That’s Harin,” Hyungu says dryly. He swings around to rummage for his coat and stomps on Yonghoon’s foot casually. “And the last time Dongmyeong apologized for anything it was for washing Dongju’s face in toilet water.”

He ignores Yonghoon’s theatrical whines and pulls on his rumpled coat. The motion brings them unexpectedly closer and Hyungu finds himself staring at Yonghoon’s chest. Yonghoon has grown suddenly quiet. Hyungu tilts his head back and finds him already looking. 

Most of the time, Yonghoon is gratifyingly easy to read. And then he gets like this, quiet and dark-eyed, watching Hyungu with an intensity only matched by the way he gets on stage. Hyungu swallows around a dry throat. The small space, the stale air, Yonghoon’s eyes, it all feels like too much, and he fumbles for the door knob. The studio door swings open, just a little, letting in the cooler air from the hallway.

“We should go, hyung,” Hyungu says, and his voice comes out cracked. “It’s really late. I’m more tired than I realized.”

Yonghoon smiles softly, forgiving. Always perfectly patient, always endlessly understanding of all the things Hyungu can’t say. “Better get you to bed quickly then,” he says, walking out into the dim hallway. “It’s late enough that all that’s left out here are ghosts.”

Hyungu quietly locks the studio door and jogs to catch up with Yonghoon, who immediately slows his pace to match him. In the reflections of the windows they pass, his smile looks a little sad, but when he turns to look at Hyungu, it’s undiminished in its brightness.

Hyungu smiles back, knowing it comes out a little too wide.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/leewoong)//[cc](curiouscat.me/hwansloth)


End file.
